I know it's been argued to death, but for some reason lately the question has surfaced again from my colleagues and strangely enough from some of my clients.

'Are we still supporting 800 x 600?' and 'Can I have it bigger than 800 x 600?' have respectively been asked more times lately than I can remember. So is there a right answer? The truth be told there is no 100% right answer for this question regarding web design standards.

Why is it becoming less of an issue?
There are plenty of reasons, but the most obvious one that springs to mind is the cost of monitors. Back in 'the day' when a 19' CRT was considered an expensive luxury item, if you needed everything on screen to be bigger on your 15 or 17' monitor (usually people with poor sight), setting the resolution to 800x600 was the solution if didn't know any other way.

But today you can buy a 21' high resolution LCD monitor that is priced better than the 19' CRT's of yesteryear. Even if you run one of these new LCD's at 1024x768 (below native I know!), everything on screen is still larger than when it was on a 17 CRT.

That aside, here are some reasons that have led to 800 x 600 being dropped in web design.

Passive Stats Research Complex.
You have looked at some of the larger sites, the ones with uber amounts of traffic that have ignored the old faithful resolution. CNN, News, Digg, ABC and Fox are just a handful of examples. You could take the 'if it's good enough for CNN, its good enough for us' approach, under the theory that the larger aforementioned companies have already done the research for you. But that's your call.

Statistical Decisiveness Syndrome.
You have a long established web site and are considering a re-design to go with your new marketing campaign. Your stats show less than 3% are using 8 x 6 to view your site. Is 3% a significant number? That depends on what number that 3% is from. At 100,000 visitors per month, that is 3,000 people hitting your site on said resolution; a hard number to ignore. But your site is only getting 1,000 visits per month, so annoying 30 people doesn't seem so bad. But the marketing campaign will probably increase your traffic, and you will soon realise the irony of more traffic means more people to piss off, going by percentages.

"...He knows nothing about web standards...He thinks W3C and CSS are names of hip-hop bands..."

Involuntary L33t Designer Suffering.
Your boss doesn't want to spend money on the web site, so he volunteers the services of his kid; a high schooler who 'knows about that web stuff', and thinks MySpace pages are good examples for web site layouts. He tries his best to implement everything you ask but he also knows nothing about web standards or good coding practices. He thinks W3C and CSS are names of hip-hop bands. You end up with a site full of tables, bloated code, uncompressed images, and designed to fit the monitor and browser he developed it in - because "it's cool to fill the screen and IE is the only browser people use anyways, Dude".

Designer Group Pressure.
All your designer buddies are slowly coming out of the 10x7 closet, admitting their preference for the larger resolution as it affords them more creativity. The extra real-estate has allowed them to push the envelope a little more, doing things they could never get away with when confined to 800 pixels. And it makes you feel inadequate. I get it. Is it so bad to neglect the 8x6 crowd? Any complaints you receive (if at all!) will seem insignificant compared to the feeling of being able to design on the same playing field as your friends. So why not!

At this stage I will admit to rethinking the way I design. It's not something I have thought about lightly, as it has been in the back of my mind since I started in this industry 10 years ago. I am doing fluid designs more often with a 10x7 minimum and sometimes 8x6 minimum when I can get away with it. It depends on the site and the client's preference.

And will say the better designs usually always come with the 1024 pixels in mind. This very site will soon see it's 4th incarnation and will be the first to be drop 8x6 support, which is a decision I purely based on my stats, with less than 1% of people using said res.

But I am not 100% committed to completely ignoring 8x6 elsewhere just yet. I always give the client the choice and explain the differences clearly, and 95% of the time they prefer to go 8x6 based on my recommendation, which is usually always the right decision :-)